Quotes By Isabel Allende

Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.

I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die.

I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.

I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.

I can promise you that women working together - linked, informed and educated - can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.

I am an American citizen and it is my home now. I like the U.S.A., which is not a place too many people have liked since Bush. The U.S. has a young population, and everything can change within a year.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.

Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets.

I don't want an uneventful and safe life, I prefer an adventurous one.

Giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country.

I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.

The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

Today's girls are tomorrow's women - and leaders.

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.

For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men.

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.

I have been a woman for 46 years and I only recently realized I can't change it and I like it.

I was a very bad journalist. Awful. I would just invent everything. If I did an interview, I had a preconception of what that person should say and I would put my words in his mouth.

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses.

I'm interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.

In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today.

I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.

Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art.

We want a world where life is preserved, and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged.